Tag Archives: Pintley

I love technology. I love finding ways to make my life easier (even if it rarely makes it “easier”) with the use of some sort of gadget. I also love beer. I love the complexity of tastes and feelings you can get from simple ingredients. And of course, what I really love is when these two things come together. In this multi-part post, I will take a look at the realms in which beer and tech geekery overlap.

Pintley
from the site: “Pintley learns from your ratings and tasting notes to understand exactly what pleases your palate the most, so you can be your own beer expert.”

Their own intro video does a good job at explaining exactly what the app does:

Think Pandora Radio for beer. When you download the app for the first time it asks you to rate about 20 popular, mainstream beers (Bass, Guinness, Blue Moon, Anchor Steam, etc.) to get a benchmark for your tastes. From there, you can view your recommendations, rate more beer, create a wishlist and more. Pintley is a free dedicated app for the iPhone, a website (www.pintley.com) and a mobile website (m.pintley.com).

Summary Page

PROS: The recommendations are what keep this app on my iPhone. It does a really good job, even just from the initial rating when you first start the app, of picking beers that you might like. Pintley also excels at including

Style Notes

very detailed info on beer styles and the different breweries. When you click on the Founder’s Kentucky Breakfast Stout entry, you get a nice summary page that shows you the relevant stats for the beer itself (Avg. Rating, Style, Brewery, Community Tasting Notes, etc.) and also allows you to delve deeper by giving a detailed description of the style of beer and the brewery. Ever wonder the Original Gravity range of an Imperial Stout? Or the ABV range? The Pintley app will tell you.

CONS: Like Beerby, there is still no good way to get a feed of the beers I have been drinking. There seems to be no way to embed anything from the site. I can’t even link to my profile. From a blogger’s standpoint this is a letdown, though I realize that most people probably don’t want the entire world to know what they’re drinking. As I said before, the recommendations are awesome, but my only complaint is that the majority of beers they recommend for me aren’t available in Missouri (Stone, Dogfish Head, Russian River, Three Floyds. It’s like they’re taunting me. Thanks Pintley! I would love a Pliny the Elder or Dark Lord. Wanna send me one?) Maybe some sort of location aware feature would help this? Basically, I want the app to know where I am, what I like to drink AND what beers are available to me in my area. Is this even possible?

CONCLUSION: I would definitely recommend downloading this app or using the website despite the fact that I really find myself using this app less than the others on my phone. It’s a really good resource for the above mentioned style notes and brewery info, but I think it seems less useful to me personally because of the recommendations. The strongest aspect of this app is also its weakness. Also, like other mobile beer apps it seems really “closed.” I can share everything to Facebook and Twitter on a beer-by-beer basis, but can’t link to my profile page or even get a simple RSS feed (like the Twitter feed on this site) of the beers I drink. The app is definitely worth the price (FREE!), but I personally have some reservations as far as daily use.

Like this review? Check out a review of Beerby, another mobile beer app, here.